Stop Trying to Fix the Thing That's Working | Ep 978

0:00I want to talk about a business myth that needs to die. It's something that so many business owners believe. Someone is playing what it is, how it's applied to thousands of businesses that have come to our headquarters here at acquisitions.com in Vegas, and how it's likely holding you back. And it's one of the most insidious beliefs, and I think it might be the one that ends the most businesses. And the crazy part is it has nothing to do with the business and everything to do about how you treat it. It's not that your business isn't scalable. It's that you want scaling to be easier, and that's the issue.

0:28Your business isn't broken. You don't need to change the business. You need to deal with the fact that solutions take time and that this might just be a feature of the business you're in. Now, part of you might think, well, if this is a feature of the business that I'm in, I don't want to have this business. Okay, well, let's walk through that. So hypothetically, if you were very good at solving that problem, would that be a problem that you'd be more okay with dealing with? Maybe. And if you're considering an alternative path, you should also consider the alternative problems, right? You're like, well, I want to do something else.

0:57Okay, tell me all the things that suck about that path, because I promise there are things that suck about that path. And then the follow-up question of that is, are you better equipped to solve those problems? Now, in the hypothetical world, you always think you're better equipped to solve those problems, but oftentimes you've never even solved them before. And maybe the problems you think that are there are not actually the real problems. The real problems are much deeper and more nefarious than the ones you're currently dealing with. And so I think that there's something so deep about the saying, the devil you know, right?

1:25Is that like, the business is the devil you know. And you've maybe been doing this for a year, two years, or five years, or 10 years, however long you've been in your industry, 20 years. The thing is, is the longer you've been in industry, the more you've mapped the system, right? The more you've mapped the terrain, you understand the good, and you understand the bad, and you understand what to do about the bad. And so fundamentally, problems will not end. And I think this is like, it's almost like a human problem that exists with entrepreneurs is that they want problems to stop and they will never stop.

1:54They will never stop. You're wishing for something that does not exist. And in so doing, you are consistently changing things about the business that is working. It's probably the same thing for people who hop from relationship to relationship. Is the one thing I want to have, I want to find a relationship that has no problems. It's not going to, it's not going to happen. You're not going to find it. But the biggest problem is all of all is that you think that there shouldn't be problems. You have a problem with your problems and that problem is solvable. You decide that there isn't a problem with having problems.

2:19You accept that having problems is a fact of life. It's a fact of business. It's a fact of wherever you're trying to go. Like, find me$100 million,$10 million, million, billion-dollar entrepreneur who says, I got here and there were no problems. In fact, today, I have actually solved all of my problems. It doesn't happen. And so we have this demand, we have this wish, and that wish is the actual biggest problem in your business because it's the thing that's causing you to break the thing that's working. And this is where you need to give time time. You need to give solutions time to breathe. And you need to give solutions time to work.

2:50And as always, once the solution actually happens, play it out. Let's say that we've got, we finally fixed our accounting, our accounting recruiting problems. We now have lots of accountants. We've created a whole school for accounting. We made 20 partnerships with different accounting schools. And now we have this, we have guys banging down the door being like, man, I would love to work for you. What's your problem now? Well, you know what? Now that I've got all these accountants, I've got all these guys with empty, empty calendars. They could have so much more capacity. I'm overpaying in payroll because I got all these guys, but I need to get more customers.

3:19And so what do you do? You start marketing more, but now the customers are coming in because you're trying to fill slots. You're lowering your bar. You're taking worse quality customers. Now your churn becomes an issue, right? And your margins start going down because you can't charge these people as much. And you've already taken on more fixed costs because you started hiring all these people. Huh? Is this sounding familiar? These are sounding like business problems because wouldn't it be convenient if that accountant would say, hey, I will wait here patiently until you have acquired 20 accounts of appropriate size and then and only then will I choose to come on board.

3:50And at that moment, you can collect their revenue and all of these customers will say, you know what, I will wait in line until you get 19 more customers just like me. And then all at once, we will start working with this new accountant that you're bringing in so that your payroll and your revenue can match. Wouldn't that be nice? It'd also be nice if this table was made of gold Or diamonds. Be sweeter if it were diamond. Or adamantium. Even cooler. But very unlikely. And so if you want to be in the wishing game, then maybe entrepreneurship isn't the right path for you. But if you want to live in the real world, you have to accept that there will be problems.

4:22And there will be things, and they typically revolve around one core issue, which is the delta between your expectations around time. So let me explain what I mean by this. Probably fourth concept. The problem isn't your expectations of the business. Your problem is the timeline of those expectations. If you want to change the world, you absolutely can. I believe that wholeheartedly. I think any one person, any one man, any one woman can change the world. I believe that. But not tomorrow. It will probably take time. It will take infrastructure. It will take help. It will take a movement. It will take many other people helping you along the way.

4:54And that does not happen overnight. Like there's the saying, Rome wasn't built in the dead. And it's true. It wasn't. And so now I'll give you a realistic timeline, I think. I work on, which is I work in decades. And the reason I choose that number is that you can go from new idea to massive global company in about 10 years. You look at zero to a Microsoft, which they IPO at about seven years, right? You look at like, obviously open AIs, like we saw their very rapid growth, but they're also, they worked since like 2017. And now they're what, like eight years in. So again, seven years, six years, I round a little higher because, you know, I don't think I'm Elon Musk.

5:36And maybe you don't think you are either. And if you're politically charged about it, pick a different entrepreneur, whatever. The point is, the rush you have is imaginary. It's not real. It's in your head. You've made it up to get to where, by when, why? Like, why? Like, we have to double this year. Why? Maybe the fact that you think you have to double this year is the reason And you'll never double over the next five years because you keep trying to cut corners. You can't build it right. And because you don't build it right, you don't get the right people in on the front end. You don't get the right people in on the back end.

6:04You get the wrong talent. You get the wrong customers. You keep churning this up because of arbitrary, arbitrary, completely made up lines that you draw in the sand and say, this must occur. And so I think if you can have the business you want, just not by the time that you want it. And so I don't think you need to change your dreams. I think you need to change your timelines. And so the idea that your business isn't scalable is actually, yet again, in relation to speed. Of course it's scalable. It's just not as scalable. It doesn't scale as fast as you'd like it to. And what part of this can we change?

6:31The as you'd like it to. That part you can change. Now, of course, you could advertise more. You could try to hire a bigger recruiting team within the constraints of your business, given the resources you have. Sure, of course, you can allocate more resources. But you're not going to solve it. These are features. And so I think a lot of people are wishing for a business that has no difficulty. And if you find it, let me know. but I've yet to see it and I've looked at a lot of businesses. And so I say this because many of you probably, one, don't need to change your business. Probably need to keep doing the business you're on.

6:57Number two, the business you're on is probably scalable. All businesses are scalable. It's just how hard is it to scale? And when we translate hard into what problems must I solve in order to scale it? And what are the alternative problems to this path that I would have to encounter if I didn't follow this path, which you'll find are often also equally difficult. And probably you're less equipped to solve them because you've never solved them before. And so the idea is I want no problem, but really you're only trading problems. And so when you're thinking about, I want this to not be this way, think about what, what problems you'd rather have.

7:25There's a big pile of problems in the middle of the table. All the business owners are tossing them in, uh, in the middle. And it's like, you got to throw your cards in your problems in and you got to pick somebody else's. When you look at everybody else's like, ah, I don't know. I don't know if I would pick them up. And the thing is, the longer you deal with your problems, the better you get at dealing with them. Kind of like the longer you've dated somebody, you're like, I kind of know how to deal with this person. I know how to deal with their crazy, right? And over time, they kind of know how to deal with your crazy, right?

7:49So your business probably isn't broken. It's probably just not growing as fast as you want because you are demanding that it grow faster. But you are in so doing trying to break things about your business that were making it work in order to get it to not work so that you no longer have that problem and you create another problem. And now you have two problems to solve, which is harder than one. Your timelines are the biggest issue in the business. and the fact that it is hard is a feature, not a buck. And the vast majority of your business career will be spent waiting in painful tolerance of the solutions that you are implementing to kick in.

8:21And you have to deal with the lashings of life while that's happening and look at everyone in the team in the eyes and say, we are working on it. And they're going to be like, well, why don't we change this? And you have to look at them and say, no. And they're going to say, but there's this fire. And you're like, yeah, but if we do your thing, then we're going to have another fire. And we're also going to incur the cost of change between both scenarios, which I'd rather just have pain one rather than pain two and cost of change pain, pain three. And so what it is, it's erratic, it's frenetic energy, it's the feeling like you must do something.

8:50And if you do, if you do have that energy, and you're like, man, I got to do something about it, go to what you're actually trying to do with the solution and try and promote yourself. Go do take some of the interviews yourself, try and speed up the cycles there by all means, try and speed up, you're just not going to eliminate it. These will be features, these will be things that you live with. And I'll leave you with one thought. There's an old, saying, an old bull and a young bull, and they see a bunch of pretty cows at the bottom of a hill. And so the young bull is looking at the old bull, and he's like, hey, let's chase, let's go run down there and see if we can catch one to procreate with.

9:21And the old bull's like, no, that's a terrible idea. And he's like, why? He's like, well, because if we charge down there, he's like, they're all going to scatter. And the young bull's like, yeah, but I'm going to take this, you know, we'll each get one. He's like, yeah, but if we walk down the hill slowly, he's like, We can procreate with them all. Now, how does this relate to business? Does this mean that if I take my time, I can pursue every single entrepreneurial endeavor? I actually think that within the context of entrepreneurship, it's backwards. You're never going to sleep with all the women.

9:48You can't. There are so many businesses that exist. And the reason for that, you have more ideas than you have time. And I think that there is a fixed cost that we must accept that it will likely take. If you really want to go big, it's going to, like, look at the biggest businesses. They're 20, 30, 40 years old. and you're like, well, I'm 30 now. It's like, right, that means until you're 70, one thing, you just keep growing. And so what does that mean downstream? It means that there are opportunities, not just some opportunities, but all other opportunities besides the one that you're currently working on, you will have to say no to.

10:23Think about that reality, like let it settle with you because you have to come to peace with it. And the fact that you haven't come to peace with it is why you keep wanting to pursue all of these things. But by pursuing all of them, you will get none of them. You can't sleep with all the women in the world. It doesn't matter what your novelty desire is. You have to understand that this is fact of life. You're not going to start every business. You're not even going to start every great idea you have. You're not even going to start 20 % of the great ideas you have, 10%, 5%, 1 out of 20, 1 out of 100.

10:52You're going to have one idea, and then you're going to have to keep sticking with it because that's where all the gains come in. It comes in the compounding. It comes in the sticking with it. The hard part about the plan isn't thinking about the plan or doing the plan. It's sticking with the plan. That's the hard part of the plan. And believe me, in the frustration that I'm having, the reason I'm like almost shouting like this is because I'm shouting at me. I'm not shouting at you. I'm shouting at me. Because it's so hard. Like, this is what's hard. It's the hard because it's a muscle you're not used to.

11:18It's a skill that you have to learn. It's a trait. You have to flex over and over and over again. And I will say this. The more you say no, the better you get at it. It never goes the way hard it is. It just gets a little bit easier. It just gets a little bit easier with time. And eventually, I think you'll know that you will have appropriately flexed that muscle when you can have no FOMO. If you can hear that someone else is doing great and be like, that's amazing for them. I know my game. I've been doing this for six years. I've been doing this for eight years. I'm going to keep doing my game.

11:46And I think a lot of it is that we have this desire for permanence. We have this desire for legacy. We have this desire to live forever. When outside of Brian Johnson, no one else is really talking about that. And up until this point, the death rate on humans is 100%. And the forget, the likelihood of forgetting of a human's life is also close to 100%. And of the people who are remembered, they're not remembered by the people they know. They're remembered by people they don't know. And by the way, they're dead. And so we have this desire. And I think it just comes into direct conflict with the idea that we just live finite lives.

12:16Time moves faster than you think. And the younger you are, the less you realize that the older you are, the more you start to be like, man, that was pretty quick. You only have a couple, a couple big bullets in it. You got a couple decades, you know? or couples too. So a few, three, four, maybe seasons. And if you really want to go big and something starts working, then you're going to do that thing for 30 or 40 years. And so like, the idea of like, oh, I'm going to own all these companies, like you can have divisions within a business if it makes sense. But most of the time, it doesn't. Most of the time, you could start this other thing, or you could just do more of the things already working.

12:46Why isn't it happening faster? Because you're demanding that it happen faster. But there's nothing wrong with your inherent business. You're saying the problem is a problem that you created. Basically, you just take reality, you move the line of expectations, and then you say there's a problem. And I see more businesses ruined because of that than just about anything else. You could make it work if you just stuck with it. And you stop thinking that there's something wrong with your business. And maybe look at the fact there might be something wrong with your expectations. That's what I got. That's my that's my Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thursday, Thirstrap, Thurman.